Explain how to plan for a character to enqueue activities, schedule daily actions, or set short-term priorities for building a structure or completing a large task

[cubap]

(build house until hungry, collect seeds until > 200, work in the shop every morning at 8)

[cubap]

It seems the AI control would test against priorities to make choices, but some of them may require looking a few moves out and forming a queue. The user's interventions would essentially be high priority directions, but may not always be first queue - there's a sort of pathfinding to the goal that needs to happen.

For example, as a user, if I notice I'm standing close to fruit trees, I may want to "gather fruit," which is really a move-find-obtain proposition. The UI may require me to actually find fruit and select it for pickup, just point to a region and set a goal, or just set a need and let the character work out the details.

[cubap]

Larger tasks would also need to be managed once the planning skills are available. If I've assigned a job to a character like "form 1200 mud bricks" it would be embarrassing if he died of starvation while completing the task. I also may want to set lower priority drives like "acquire flint rocks whenever you get the chance," so as not to interrupt normal hunting and gathering behaviors.

[ladmeyer]

I think there should be something like a button in the HUD. When it is clicked/selected/whatever, another item is clicked and then the player can set parameters within a menu that pops up after clicking the object. Some of these parameters could be

-whenever you get the chance -until I tell you to stop -for a day -for an hour -unless another person tells you not to

[ladmeyer]

Another thing that needs to be discussed (perhaps in another thread) is the process of other players using "lead", if you are in a tribe. Then, what determines if the player continues to gather sticks or helps build the tribe's city?

[cubap]

Maybe the "lead" concept is related to #39, where a character would agree to follow for some purpose (construction, combat, etc.) and then a priority is set for that which weighs against their own thresholds for hunger, etc.

[ladmeyer]

So it sounds to me like there needs to be a "priorities" system that will eventually have to be coded if we are going to have this whole system of weighing against other tasks. Hmm.

[cubap]

This is a site I looked at when I first started wondering about basics of how the AI systems would work.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/designing-artificial-intelligence-for-games-part-1

also, this site has tons of good math and reviews of algorithms

http://www.redblobgames.com/